Reimagine your fundraising communications to move from deficit to dignity.
Across causes, fundraising communications have long relied on narratives of scarcity, urgency, and suffering to mobilise support. While these narratives can be effective in the short term, they also increasingly reinforce power imbalances, misrepresent communities, and compel people to perform for support.
This workshop explores a practical and powerful shift underway in civil society: The reimagining of public narratives around poverty and social change to centre dignity, capability, and agency – without losing fundraising effectiveness.
Drawing on real-world experience, the session examines what happens when organisations move away from deficit-based storytelling and rebuild communications that showcase lived realities not as spectacles to be consumed but as human struggles to be understood.
In the session, you will engage with honest reflections on what works, what doesn’t, and what has to be unlearned in the process of changing how stories are told to donors and to the public. Together, we will address the growing challenge of how to communicate impact in ways that build trust, strengthen partnerships, and respect the people and communities at the heart of our work.
If you want to find out how ethical public narratives can support sustained resource mobilisation over transactional giving, this is where you need to be. Join us to learn how to recognise language, imagery, and framing in your own communications that unintentionally reinforce pity, power imbalances, and short-term thinking, and understand the risks these pose to trust and long-term fundraising. You will gain practical approaches to reframing stories around agency, resilience, and capability while still maintaining urgency, clarity of need, and fundraising effectiveness.
Learning outcomes
- Learn to identify and move beyond deficit-based narratives
- Find out how to apply dignity- and capability-led storytelling for effective fundraising communications
- Discover how ethical narrative choices can create stronger supporter relationships and influence donor behaviour